“I don’t know how to break the spell,” I whisper to Reagan. “I can’t believe—I’m so thoughtless. I don’t know how—”
“Yes you do,” Reagan says. “You know how spells work. Remember what Willa said. Breathe. Think. They give you something. And then you perform an Undoing. Just like my spell. It’s the same.”
“It hurts,” Bethly says. “The Undoing.” She puts a hand on my arm, and it’s a mother’s touch. God, I’ve missed it. I move away from it, because how good it feels makes the rest of me ache. It makes me hungrier for all of it. Food and my sisters and my mother and a better world.
“That’s fine,” I say. “Everything hurts.”
“You just have to choose what you want from them,” Willa says. “They can bring you presents. Or you could banish them all to Farr or AndNot. Make them fight in a battle. Make them give up their land.” Her eyes shine. She has a hundred ideas. Willa is always full of ideas.
But.
But.
Drum Drascall is already gone.
The royals in the woods were from other kingdoms. And they were royals, not subjects.
I try to remember what I’m punishing the people of Ever for. Everything is turned upside down and inside out, and after a day being away from the castle, I don’t feel so much like a princess. Somewhere along the way, I lost my shoes, my tiara, my diamond earrings, my certainty.
I dig my feet into the Ever earth a little. It’s so dusty and dry; who knows if it will grow anything again. The people of Ever, what’s left of them, sit in their used-to-be gardens on their once-upon-a-time farmland, and they howl at the glass boxes with their loved ones inside. They don’t have anything left to give me.
“I can’t ask for anything,” I say to the witches next to me. “What would they have to give me?”
“What do you need?” Reagan asks.
I look at the castle. It is still. My sisters in their boxes are as frozen as my mother on the lawn. All that’s left of my family is me and the man who was once my father and was once the Good and Gentle King and is now someone else entirely.
If I could magic things back to the way they were before the spell, I wouldn’t. That before wasn’t real. It didn’t exist. Not the way I thought it did.
There’s only one thing I need, and the people of Ever can’t give it to me.
The king steps out onto the balcony of the highest tower. My sisters in their boxes beside him look as lifeless as they did the last time he was on his balcony giving a speech.
“What did I do, what did I do, what did I do?” I say under my breath.
“Jane. Just do better this time,” Reagan says, like it’s that easy. I spent years learning what it meant to be a queen, but everything about it was wrong.
“I can’t,” I say. It feels true enough. I can barely think or stand or hope. For a moment, I don’t even want to fix it. I don’t want to break the spell I cast, and I don’t want to break the spell Reagan cast. I want to stand right here until someone else fixes it. Maybe I even want to die. Slip away and never know what it is to live in another kind of kingdom.
Reagan must see it. She pinches my arm.
“Don’t look away,” she says. My heart squeezes at all the times I have done exactly that. I close my eyes for one second, then force them all the way open. Train them on my father. Look for edges of glass boxes with princesses inside, hidden behind him.
“People of Ever,” the king says. From a certain angle, he still looks like my father. There are the same gray threads in his beard, the same oversize fur robe, the same enormous crown that I can’t imagine him ever handing over. But mostly he looks like someone I don’t know at all. “It is now that you need your king more than ever. I see that. I understand that. I am here for you. As I have always been here for you. Through the Famine. Through the Spell of Without. Through all of our suffering.”
He says the word “suffering” like he knows what it means. But the Famine didn’t hurt him. And the Spell of Without didn’t hurt him either. He looks like a man who is hurt. He is excellent at playing the part. But I watch his hand as it straightens the crown atop his head, and the way his arms cross over his chest after.
There is a smattering of applause, but not the thunder he is used to.
“I am the only one who can get us through these terrible times,” the king, my father, says. He sounds so sure about it. He sounds like the hero of a story that no one is telling. His voice is loud. And mine is soft. But he is up in a tower, and I am right here, right here on the bare, dusty ground of Ever, ready at last to fight.
“People of Ever,” I say, surprised at the way the words feel in my mouth. “We can break the spell. We will break it together.” I don’t mean to sound like him, but I do a little. I sound a little like a someday maybe future queen and a little like a Spellbound princess and a little like a brand-new witch and a little like Jane, just Jane, a person in a blue dress and a wool skirt who would do almost anything for an apple.
The taste of it, I swear, sneaks onto my tongue. A tang. A sweetness. It’s gone before I can enjoy it. But it was there. Apple.
I tell them what they have to do to break the spell.
28. REAGAN
“To break a spell,” Jane says, “there is a sacrifice and an Undoing. It is time to break the spell. The one on you. The one on me. The one on all of Ever.”
The unboxed people of Ever look up. They are wary of this princess, with her soft, starving voice and her shaking hands. And they are wary of the king in his tower. And they are wary of the rest of us witches, walking around when so many other people are trapped in glass.
“To break the spell, you will go to the castle. You will cross the moat. We will get the crown.”
There’s a pause.
There is always a pause when you tell someone how to break a spell. There was a pause two days ago, at the Thirteenth Birthday. It felt like a hundred years, but it was probably barely three seconds. Still, it is a distinctly quiet thing.
“We can’t,” a white man leaning against his wife’s glass box says.
“It’s water,” a person with an upturned nose cries.
“We don’t cross the moat,” a young kid in a thick sweater says, as if we need Ever to be explained to us.
“Well, today you do,” Jane says. Her back is straight. She pulls her hair up on top of her head in a messy knot. She hikes her wool skirt up.
Olive, my mother, Willa, and I follow suit, pinning up hair, tying up layers and layers of magical skirts, readying ourselves for the cool water.
Jane steps in. “It’s just water,” she says.
“They’re Spellbound to be afraid of it,” Willa says. Jane knows this, of course. We all know this. “They can’t cross the moat.”
“I think they can,” Jane says. She takes another step in and another. She walks straight to the middle of the moat, where the water is nearly up to her neck.
“It’s not safe,” Turner Dodd says. The one who is not, in fact, the saddest person in Ever. He’s sad, though. A lot of them are, it turns out. So much sadness packed into this one little kingdom, and we had to use magic to get a thimbleful of tears. I shiver from all the things I’m still trying to understand.
Jane laughs. Right there, in the middle of the moat, soaking and starving and Spellbound. She laughs so hard I start to laugh. Olive laughs a little too. Willa giggles. Even my mother gives a wry smile at worry over a moat when the world is falling apart.
“Ever isn’t safe,” Jane says. “What do you have left to be afraid of?”
The king in his tower booms out objections. “Subjects of Ever can’t cross the moat,” he says. “Think of what it will do to the kingdom. It’s not how things are done. It’s not safe. It’s not right.” But I keep laughing, and the unboxed, unbound people of Ever look at a sea of glass boxes and miles of Barren Fields and the everlasting day and the Woods That Were and their king in his tower holding his crown onto his head like it means something, like it m
atters, like it makes what he says matter more.
There is a splash. And a splatter. And a series of waves.
There is Abbott Shine up to his waist in water.
There are two young children atop their parents’ shoulders.
There is Turner Dodd, crying as he takes the world’s smallest steps into the moat.
There is a rush of two hundred sets of legs in every shade of skin feeling the cold of the moat for the very first time. They scream, a few of them, in alarm at the temperature of it or the wetness maybe. They shiver and worry and wonder what might happen. They gasp.
They’re afraid. That hasn’t gone anywhere. They are Spellbound to be afraid, so they are afraid.
But they are in it, wading in the shallow end at first, then joining Jane in the middle. And by the time Jane makes it to the castle, to where her mother is waiting for her in a glass box, the whole of unboxed Ever is in that moat, walking and floating and swimming and running and screaming and crying all the way to the other side.
I watch with my mother as Willa runs across the moat. She splashes and shrieks. She does it alone and doesn’t seem to notice we aren’t next to her. And we watch Olive lift her chin up high and walk through, catching up with her half brother waiting for her in the middle, holding her hand for the harder half. She won’t be alone in that castle again.
Mom is shaking next to me. She doesn’t want to go. “You don’t have to,” I say.
“I know,” she says. She licks her lips. There’s nothing there to lick, but she does it anyway. She stares up at the king in his tower. He is looking right at us.
“Look what you’ve done,” he says, to her or to me or to his daughter, it’s hard to say. “All I ever did was try to be a Good King.”
What we want more than anything, what I know my mom wants, and what I want so badly I can barely breathe, is for him to apologize and say he was wrong. That is the ending we deserve.
He will never give us that.
It would be nice, to be given everything we deserve.
But it’s not necessary. And if he won’t give it, we’ll just take it.
We’re goddamn witches. Don’t tell us we can’t.
29. JANE
I don’t let anyone in until Reagan and her mother are all the way across the moat. I won’t let them enter alone.
“We’re ready,” Reagan says when she reaches shore. I look at Bethly. She is soaking wet and gripping her daughter’s arm. But she is as ready as the rest of us, pulling her shoulders back, lifting her head, taking big breaths, like she might blow the whole thing down.
There’s a flurry of conversation among the subjects of Ever. They want their wives and daughters and mothers unboxed. Mostly. Mostly they do. But they also want to know if this is the only way.
“He’s a Good King,” a man who looks like my father says. Maybe he’s dined in our castle before. Maybe he came to my Birthday. Maybe he himself is a good man or a kind man, but he is wrong about my father. “He’s the Gentle King,” the man goes on, shaking his head and speaking a little more loudly, a little more confidently, drumming up support. People nod.
“He sent wood to fix our roof,” one says.
“He saved my child from the moat once,” another says.
“Think of how the queen fell in love with him. Because he was so good to her. So unlike other princes and dukes from other kingdoms.” My heart twists at this one, thinking of my father and mother but also of Grace, who pinned her every hope and dream on their love story. A story I am taking apart. A story we may never tell again.
“He sent us pineapples when my mother was dying,” a person in a green coat sighs.
“He kept the witches away.”
“He reached peace with the other kingdoms.”
“He loved his children. Let them be themselves. Didn’t try to force Alice into being a prince. Didn’t stop Nora from playing in the mud, or Grace from her daydreaming. Never laughed at their dolls or ribbons or gowns. He let us all be ourselves. He is Good.” There is finality to this last statement, and again my heart wrestles with itself. Images flash in my head: of my father letting me try on his crown, letting me sit on his throne, calling me Queen Jane. My father brushing my hair, learning how to French braid it. My father making us pancakes, and making tiny miniature ones for our favorite dolls. My father lighting his candle, hoping for the princess to return, bringing it to my mother in her glass box in the evenings and talking to her about his day. My father telling me I could love anyone and be anything.
My father, the king.
But also: there’s the image of his hands on Olive, his shadow making attendants shiver, a long-ago time when I thought I heard him say something about what kind of girl would let a man hurt her, how silly a girl like that must be, how weak.
His straight back at Eden’s Thirteenth Birthday.
The way he smiled at the King of Soar, the Prince of Droomland, the Princess of Thorner, nodding as they each appraised us. His scowl when he called me unstable. The quick, easy way he locked up my sisters.
And Bethly. And Olive. And the ways they each hold their body, leaning back a little when you get too close, looking worried at what might happen next.
If a queen is silent, I guess I won’t be queen.
“He shouldn’t be king,” I say. My voice is weak. It is weaker every second. The spell is so close to True that I can feel it in my bones, rattling around, readying me for something awful. I try again. “My father isn’t the Good King. Or the Gentle King. Or the king that cares about any of you.” I look out at the people of Ever, what’s left of them. They keep whispering among themselves, looking from the castle’s tower to the moat they conquered, to their loved ones in boxes, to me. Over and over and over, they land on me.
But I don’t know what else to say.
My father knows what to say. Of course he does. He opens his mouth, and like that, my chance to say the truth, to change the world, to break the spell, slips further away. His voice is booming where mine is weak. His is steady where mine shakes. He is tall where I’m small and thick where I am broken. He is in his robe and his crown, and he is the highest point in Ever; he is the king; he is their King.
“My poor daughter,” he says. “She is so confused. She’s brought you over here in some fit of hallucination. It isn’t her fault. We all know whose fault it is. She’s never been the same, not since the spell hit. Our prized princess, our someday queen. That girl is gone. Look at the girl in front of you. We should be thanking the heads of every kingdom for considering taking her in, having their children marry her. She barely knows her own name. She hasn’t eaten in five years. Don’t forget that. She’s not capable. Not now. Not like this.” He shakes his head and lets his voice falter, lets it sound as if he is going to cry from the pain of it, but the tears don’t come. “You know me,” he says, and I know they feel like they do. “You know what kind of king I am.”
30. REAGAN
“I know what kind of king you are,” a voice from the crowd calls out. I make sure it isn’t me who said it. I have been trying to find my voice, wondering if my mom will find hers. I listen for her breathing and mine. We take big breaths, like we are about to speak, and then we don’t.
I look for the origin of the first voice to speak. And when I find it, I put my hand over my heart. The voice belongs to Abbott Shine. He is not a princess or a witch or Spellbound. He is handsome and tall; he has a voice that is lower than I ever thought his voice would reach. He is just like them, except he knows a different king than they do.
“Give us the crown,” he says. He could chant it or yell it, he could say what was done, but it’s not his story to tell. He lets the words ring out on their own, and he waits. We all wait. The people of Ever shuffle. A princess they can deny. A witch they can hate. They try to decide how to ignore Abbott Shine, too, but it seems harder.
“I know what kind of king you are,” another voice says. “Give us the crown.”
This time th
e voice is a sweeter one, but surprisingly strong. The voice of my mother.
“I know what kind of king you are,” Olive says next. “Give us the crown.”
There is the sound of glass cracking. A spell isn’t broken all at once; it comes tumbling down in bits and pieces. Jane’s spell is breaking down. Her magic is entirely her own: big and strange and reckless but also ready to break apart, openhearted, changeable.
“I know what kind of king you are,” Willa says. “Give us the crown.”
“I know what kind of king you are,” someone says, their voice caught up in a sob, the sound of someone who has kept a secret for a long time. “Give us the crown.”
More glass cracks and shatters, and a few of the now-witches of Ever break out of their boxes. They shake out their hands when they do, the feeling of magic unfamiliar in the tips of their fingers. I can hear glass breaking inside the castle too, the sounds of attendants and maybe princesses escaping their curse.
“I know what kind of king you are. Give us the crown,” some of the people emerging from their boxes call. Not all of them. Not even many of them. But a few. Enough.
The temperature of the kingdom lifts, the warmth of a hundred witches finding one another, the feeling of magic coming back, rushing back in. We were always witches; we just didn’t know. Whatever happened between Jane and me has unleashed all of that magic back to its rightful owners, all these decades later. I watch the king’s hand travel to his forehead, wiping sweat away. It snakes around to the back of his neck, where he lifts up his robe, airing himself out.
“The kingdom is meant to be at rest,” the king says. His voice is less steady. He clears his throat and tries again. It isn’t much better, though. “The kingdom can’t be at rest with all this chaos. Without a king in a castle. Without the witches out of the way. This isn’t safe. I’m telling you, this will be like the long-ago War We Won. Do you want to be at war again? Do you want another Famine? Do you want things to get worse?”
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